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Your Buyers Are Emotional B****s
Here's how to ethically manipulate them!
Chris Laub
November 06, 2024
1,102 Words | 4 Min 35 Sec Read
Welcome to another issue of Passionate Income.
Today we’ll be discussing why your buyers are emotional babies.
In particular, we'll cover why sales pitches based in logic tend to fail, and what you should focus on instead to create a campaign that succeed.
Let’s dive in.
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Struggling to sell your product or service is one of the most frustrating aspects of being in business, especially when you know you have something good that your customers would benefit from.
Unfortunately, it can be extremely difficult to pinpoint the precise reason someone doesn’t buy something. Doubts over its effectiveness, personal issues that have absolutely nothing to do with your product or service—there are hundreds, if not thousands, of reasons someone might not buy from you.
But in many cases, their number one reason for not buying from you boils down to one thing: they don’t feel emotionally compelled to buy.
Before we get into the marketing psychology behind this, let me explain using an analogy.
First, imagine you go on a date with someone who meets all your surface-level criteria. You like their physical appearance, you share many of the same interests, and you even have the same life goals, morals, and values.
Except for one small thing: you can’t stand the idea of spending another minute with this person, let alone the rest of your life. Why?
Whether you refer to it as a connection, chemistry, or vibes, all of these terms refer to the same thing: emotional buy-in.
The criteria you have for a casual hookup or romantic partner come from your logical brain. In particular, it’s your brain drawing logical conclusions based on the types of men or women you have been attracted to in the past.
The only problem is, when you meet someone you have explosive chemistry with, all that stuff goes out the window.
Women are highly aware of this, but men seem to struggle with the concept. This makes sense: traditionally, women are more emotional creatures while men are more logical.
The perfect example is the guy who is kind of short, doesn’t have a particularly high-status job, but can make women laugh like there’s no tomorrow. Despite not meeting women’s logical criteria for a hookup or romantic partner, we all know men like this who do well with the opposite sex.
So why am I going so in-depth with our dating analogy?
Because buying decisions are made the same exact way.
Unless you sell a commodity like toilet paper or water, most purchases that aren't necessities or impulse buys are made using this same emotions-first, logic-later process.
Which is precisely why so many marketing campaigns fail: Despite good intentions, they're designed to appeal to people's logic.
As a marketer, you might think a left-brained approach would be effective.
You tell people the benefits of using your product. You show them the numbers behind its effectiveness. You use social proof to enhance its credibility.
The problem is, none of these activate your prospect's buying impulse on an emotional basis. Instead, they activate logic first while completely overlooking the need for an emotional appeal.
However, since the majority of the population makes decisions on an emotions-first, logic-second basis, this approach fails more often than not.
(There is a small subsegment of the population that makes decisions on a purely logical basis. But unless you’re selling to engineers, accountants, or some other brainiac, male-dominated field, it’s safe to assume your target audience is not one of those subsegments.)
So what’s the solution?
Lead with emotion.
The first and most frequently cited tactic for doing this is storytelling.
Wisdom has been passed down through the ages via stories. Mainly because stories bypass the brain’s logical filters and go straight to the subconscious.
Stories also allow your prospect to imagine themselves in the shoes of the main character. Which is why most Internet marketers who have personal brands use the Hero’s Journey framework.
From Neo in the Matrix to Harry Potter, the general public swoons for underdogs who overcome difficulties to achieve success.
(Along the same lines, this is why rags-to-riches stories work so well.)
Second, you can activate emotions by tapping into people's unspoken desires.
From lust to vanity to pride, most of today’s luxury brands—particularly beauty and perfume/cologne brands—appeal to people's desires to be more sexually attractive, higher status, etc.
However, as you’ve likely noticed, almost nobody speaks out loud about their desire to be envied by others, or higher status. Instead, these are things we know most people want, but are considered socially taboo to discuss.
Veteran copywriter Dan Kennedy refers to these as the secret benefit, or the hidden benefit that lies behind the more obvious one.
In Copywriting 101, we learn to highlight our product's features and benefits. The problem is, as discussed earlier, most amateurs do that from the perspective of appealing to logic.
But when you dig a layer deeper, you find the real reason behind someone's desire for the surface-level benefit.
Unless you’re selling something utilitarian—like a vegetable chopper—there’s a high likelihood that motivation relates to something like status or beauty.
In conclusion, it doesn’t matter if someone is selecting a romantic partner, choosing between five different houses, or purchasing a coaching program.
In the overwhelming majority of situations, the buyer makes emotional decisions first and then looks for logical justifications to support the decision they’ve already made on a subconscious level.
So if you’re struggling to sell your product or service, try putting more emphasis on the emotional hot buttons that lie beneath the surface-level desires for your product or service.
💡 Takeaway: While it would seem rational that marketing campaigns based on logic would be persuasive, in most cases they bomb. And the reason they struggle is because they fail to account for the "why" underlying most people's buying decisions. The good news? If you can figure out that "why," you can combine both logic and emotion to create a winning campaign.
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